AlexB

My short story Sui Generis is available on Amazon shorturl.at/akotx.

As I walked along the promenade, a profound sadness seemed to radiate from the people around me. No happy faces remained; there were no joyful sounds, no light-hearted gestures—only a grave silence broken by occasional grumbling. Yet my own heart was brimming with joy.Perhaps I ought to have mourned for them. They were, after all, no different from me. And still, I sang softly to myself and trembled with delight as the sun poured down its warmth and seemed to sing along. Nothing is ever complete. Even as I am bathed in joy, countless others suffer. And no doubt, when my own time of suffering arrives, many will be celebrating life, radiant with happiness.Such is the cycle. The balance. The essence of life itself.

To Rav, the scene resembled a forest poised for a blaze. Dry grass, brittle twigs, and parched leaves surrounded him—fuel waiting for a spark. These people, caught up in their own frenzied narratives, were part of that tinderbox, and Rav knew better than to linger too close as the day grew hotter. The only truly innocent gazes belonged to the children, clinging tightly to their parents. They looked upon the Leviathan with unburdened curiosity, untouched by the fevered speculation of the adults around them. Young shoots in the path of a wildfire, Rav thought, their fragile lives at risk of being consumed by the flames of the crowd’s fervor.

The sun crept over the horizon, but the procession didn’t falter. An unseen, numinous force pushed them forward, urging step after step. Some, eventually, gave in to fatigue, sprawling across flat rocks to catch their breath, knowing they would soon rise again, driven by the same mysterious compulsion. Time itself seemed to shift. The flow of day and night blurred together, a mingling tide of light and shadow. The familiar rhythms of the world unraveled, and Illian knew such disruptions could only lead to a breaking point.

He nodded, the instructions embedding into his augmented memory. As he prepared to leave, a sense of purpose filled him, but so did a shadow of doubt. Could he, in this new form, truly connect with others, or was he destined to observe from the outside, forever part of the network yet apart from humanity?

He walked against the flow of commuters, deeper into the city, toward wherever the violet light was coming from. Behind him, a pigeon followed at rooftop height, never blinking. The first gate was already closing.

The grand ruins of Terra Obscura sprawled in timeless splendor, a place where stones from forgotten eras lay tangled in layers of history. Bathed in golden sunlight or soaked by relentless rain, the ruins never failed to stir the human soul. Their reach extended far, large enough to house an entire town within their crumbling walls.

A bitter smirk twisted my lips. I was getting old—seventy-three, if the years still meant anything. The “juices” kept me ticking, a trade-off for immortality no one could refuse. But I felt obsolete, a fading echo in a world that didn’t need me.

With this clarified sight came revelations previously unimaginable: fragments once felt only dimly—hints in emotion, in fleeting intuition—now connected into coherent patterns. Feelings overlapped with images; purposes and meanings emerged where before there had been only vague silhouettes.

The moment my fingers closed around the plug, the room exploded into light. Not the sterile white of server towers, but a chaotic storm of holograms - fractured memories, data shards whipping through the air like angry ghosts. Faces I didn’t recognize. Places that looked like the UPI before it curdled. And Harper, younger, laughing in a world that still had sunlight.

The ship’s interior swallowed sound, enveloping him in a silence that was almost tangible. Illian’s sharp ears strained, catching only the faint whisper of his own footfalls, their echoes quickly absorbed into the void. Could it be that even the Leviathan’s hermits had succumbed to the gravity of the Sui Generis? The idea lingered, though he struggled to accept it. The locals were bound to this vessel by fervent rituals; it was difficult to imagine anything that might compel them to abandon their sacred refuge, forsaking the Leviathan during a mass pilgrimage. Yet as Illian ventured deeper, the silence grew even more profound, as if the ship itself held its breath, lifeless and hollow.

The cloud had lowered until the wheelhouse roof itself faded in and out of view. Sound came in fragments: the laboring engine, the slap of water against the float, the low voice of the radio in Hale’s hand repeating their call sign and waiting for the next instruction that could not yet arrive. John looked at the remaining boats, then at the distance that had opened. He did not cast off another line. The rotation in the harbor water had spread until it reached the pilings; small pieces of weed and debris turned in slow circles and did not drift outward.

The hull finished its shift with a sound like distant ice settling. Diamond mode locked. Outside, the fire bridge rushed toward them, no longer a distant phenomenon but a structure they were about to enter. The darker shape flickered once more—closer, larger, and for the first time clearly oriented toward the ship—then dissolved into the river of light as if it had only been a fold in the plasma all along.

He watched a woman in a red coat hurry along the sidewalk, shoulders hunched against the cold she hadn’t expected. For a moment he envied her urgency, the clean narrative of her destination. Somewhere, someone was waiting for her. Or at least she believed they were.

His words landed heavy, stirring something restless in me. I thought of the revelers, clutching their glasses, drowning in noise to avoid the silence. I thought of my own life, the routines I clung to, the questions I’d stopped asking. The tree loomed larger now, not just a tree but a mirror, reflecting the choices we’d all made to stay small, to stay safe.

Clouds of dust rose from the ground, swirling around the mirror like a legion of war horses galloping through the air.

The path wound through the forest, dappled light playing across his shoulders. He noticed things he hadn’t before: the way moss clung to a fallen log, its green vivid against the decay; the faint tracks of a deer pressed into the mud; the way the air cooled where the trees grew dense.

The faintest tremor rippled through the earth, a subtle yet haunting reminder of the ancient deity slumbering beneath our feet.

Sleep came in fragments, haunted by dreams of ascent. In them, he climbed not with ropes or jets, but with hands that bled into the stone, merging flesh with regolith until he became the slope itself—eternal, eroded, empty. He woke to an alert: proximity warning. His suit's external cam showed nothing but dust devils pirouetting in the rover's beams. Paranoia, he logged. Solitude's tax. But as he suited up for the morning traverse, the wind carried a new note—a low moan, resonant, like the mountain exhaling.

Some patches of the path reminded of a devil’s yarn, throwing one back many steps, misleading, confusing and leading astray, just to lead out of the thickets, making one realize they never stopped moving forward.

They returned to the shore as the light began to fail. John built a small fire of driftwood in the lee of the cliffs and set a pot of water to boil. Hale sat on a flat stone with the vial between her knees and studied the membrane by the light of a headlamp. Under magnification it showed a fine, hexagonal lattice, not cellular in any familiar sense, but ordered. When she warmed the glass with her hand the lattice contracted, then expanded again, each cycle slower than the last. The cold did not leave the vial. It seemed, if anything, to deepen.